Crap. Now Elizabeth Vrba has died.

It’s not a great time to be in the sciences, is it?

Read Niles Eldredge’s obituary for Elizabeth Vrba if you don’t know who she is.

Vrba argued that the width of the niche that a species can occupy drives rates of both speciation and extinction, with the environment being the main force underlying this evolution. Her ‘effect hypothesis’ proposed that apparent directional trends in evolution are accumulations of increasing specialization inside lineages of narrow-niched species — a phenomenon she later referred to as species sorting — and are not necessarily manifestations of species selection.

Her emphasis on the importance of interactions with the environment has colored my own views on evolution. Now I’m wishing I could teach my ecological development course again and increase that perspective, but unfortunately, I feel a bit like a lame duck at my university, confined to teaching core service courses until the day I die (not out of any problem, but just because we’re under tight constraints to teach the absolutely necessary curriculum, and it would be better for junior faculty to explore new ideas), and I fear I’m going to be teaching nothing but cell biology and genetics for quite a while.